In this years New Years Honours my old boss at the OS has been made a Companion of the Order of the Bath, a honour bestowed upon senior members of the civil service within the UK and a true badge of the establishment.
Congratulations Vanessa, this is well deserved (I’m sure getting OpenSpace out of the door helped 🙂 ), btw can you get me an introduction with Kylie ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
The OS OpenSpace API has finally launched, just weeks before the deadline imposed by the Cabinet Office, with a alpha test phase with the system finally opening up early next year..
I’d love to see comments from anyone who is part of the alpha, but I guess they are under pretty strict NDA at the moment. [UPDATE 15/12 – There is no NDA, so I’m not sure why there are no examples]
One observation is the limit on the number of maps tiles which may be rendered for an API key, this is not something I have seen elsewhere, but I can understand it as a defence against accusations from commercial users of the data of unfairness.
Still is great to see something I put so much effort into during my time at the OS finally reaching the public.
Written and Submitted from the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Manama, Bahrain, using its wifi broadband network.
I got myself in trouble on a number of occasions with my old boss when I drew the obvious comparisons between the Geodata industry and the Music Industry, and how Geodata providers needed to move with the times..
It is therefore interesting to see that a least one music industry boss is recognising the mistakes of the past/present… to quote Edgar Bronfman of Warner Music..
“We used to fool ourselves…We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”
Remember this is not always about making information free, it is about making it accessible..
There is a lesson there for leadership of a number of .gov.uk organisations don’t you think ?
Written and submitted from Starbucks, Horseferry Road, using my three 3G modem.